When

Where

Digital Humanities Berkeley Summer Institute

We're thrilled to be co-presenting the Digital Humanities at Berkeley Summer Institute with Digital Humanities at Berkeley for the third year running!

In the spirit of encouraging "thoughtful application of digital tools and methodologies to humanistic inquiry," Berkeley's very own Digital Humanities Summer Institute invites you to participate in a host of workshops and open-to-the-public conversations over the course of the week.

The schedule of events is heavily interdisciplinary, offering events that run the gamut from workshops on geospatial data visualization, to discussions on using digital tools to examine "whiteness" in American novels.

The amateur Digital Humanist need not be excluded; the summer program offers introductory workshops.

Public Talks:

Research IT supports scholars across all academic division on campus, and has a particularly long track record working with researchers in the humanities. This talk will highlight how Research IT's Berkeley Research Computing and Research Data Management services have contributed to digital humanities projects at Berkeley. Examples will include optical character recognition (OCR), photogrammetry/3D modeling, and GIS.

This talk combines critical and computational approaches to examine the evolution and distribution of "whiteness" in the US novel from 1950-2000. Through pattern recognition, as well as close reading and historical methods, I attempt to track a semantics and aesthetic form to whiteness across different categories of the US novel, in hopes of extending recent and canonical histories and theories of whiteness within Critical Race Studies. In broadest form, the talk reflects on the potential challenges and benefits to bringing a Distant Reading approach to bear on the study of literature and race.

The HathiTrust is a consortium of research libraries, and its digital library currently contains over 14 million items. The HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) seeks to make this very large collection accessible for non-consumptive research via algorithmic text analysis. This session will show attendees how to explore this massive corpus using Python and Jupyter Notebooks. We will download a subset of book data and implement popular text analysis techniques. No programming knowledge required!

The category of human has historically been used to dehumanize groups of people in order to justify their deaths. This talk considers the stakes of the digital humanities by centering the experience, words and ideas of formerly dehumanized groups including trans and gender non-conforming people of color. I read the forms of movement that trans people of color use to survive, made perceptible in digital media and art, as a trans of color poetics based on the operations of shifting and stiching. These operations are combined into an algorithmic form of analysis that can extend the intersectional and assemblage models. Through the figure of an android that runs on digital code but contains a yearning to be more than an object, I propose an ethics that extends beyond the limits of the human.

Hubert Mara, Coordinator of the Forensic Computational Geometry Laboratory at Heidelberg University "Forensic Algorithms for 3D and 2D Handwriting and Archaeological Objects"

Motivated by the demand for analysis of damaged objects we are developing new methods for filterning triangular meshes provided by high resolution 3D-scanners. This work began with improving the readability of cuneiform tablets, which are one of the oldest and largest sources for human history used throughout four millenia before Christ. These tablets are made from clay and inscribed with a rectangular stylus leaving wedges shaped markings. Hence they are named after the Latin word cuneus. As these tablets are easily made with almost no cost, archaeologists have unearthed tremendous amounts of this wedge-shaped Script in 3D, which features the challenges known from the domain of handwritten documents. This lead to the development of filtering algorithms using Multi-Scale Integral Invariants (MSIIs), which are core methods in our Open Source based GigaMesh software framework. In a first step we compute high contrast visualizations of 3D-models of cuneiform tablets with these robust MSII filters allowing for a dramatically improved visibility of cuneiform characters. It was even possible to visualize small details like sealings and fingerprints left on the clay tablets. In a second step we compute and extract line tracings of the characters stored as Scalable Vector Graphics (SVGs) files. These files are processed using a word-spotting inspired approach to make digital drawings of tablets searchable. In general we can process all other types of objects with Script in 3D. Examples will be shown for weathered medieval tombstones made from sandstone and a lead plate buried with Gisela of Swabia. An adaption of the 3D filter for digitized documents (2D) will be shown on the example of the George Washington letters dataset.

Keynote Address: David Goldberg,Director and Profesor, University of California Humanities Research Institute "AI Go Rithm: On Algorithmic Being"

The talk will discuss whether the algorithm has an ontological character irreducible to the anthropomorphic projection usually ascribed to it. Some of the social implications of "algorithmic being" will be discussed too.